Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an object recognition apparatus configured to recognize an object on the basis of a pickup image of a camera.
Description of the Related Art
Hitherto, there has been known an object recognition apparatus adapted to recognize a pedestrian, contact with whom is to be avoided by a vehicle, from an image of a road ahead of the vehicle acquired by a camera mounted in the vehicle (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-279808).
According to the object recognition apparatus described in the foregoing publication, an image part of an object existing around a vehicle (a candidate of an image part of a pedestrian) is extracted from an image acquired by a camera, and then it is identified whether or not the image part of the object is an image part of a pedestrian. Thereafter, the orientation of the pedestrian in the image part that has been identified as the image part of the pedestrian is determined, and it is further determined whether the contact of the vehicle with the object is to be avoided. Then, a notice is given to a driver on the basis of the result of the determination.
An identifying technique as a method of identifying whether or not the image part of an object is the image part of a pedestrian is based on the characteristics indicating the shape of an object, such as the aspect ratio of the image part of an object, the ratio between the area of the image part of the object and the area of a circumscribed quadrangle of the image part of the object, or the characteristics, such as the size of the image part of the object and the luminance dispersion on a grayscale image.
However, when recognizing a pedestrian from a pickup image of a camera, if multiple candidates of the image parts of the pedestrian are extracted, then each of the candidates has to be checked to identify whether or not the candidate is the image part of the pedestrian, thus presenting a problem of prolonged time required for recognizing the pedestrian.